The Republicans Are Terrified of 2026

The Republicans know only one way to win: cheat. This podcast examines the means by which they are doing it. The solution is to vote no matter how hard they try to keep you from doing it, and massive strikes in the event Trump and his cronies attempt to obstruct the election. We have to push back if we are to save our democracy.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome back to America's Fractured Politics. I'm your host, mark Mansour. Today we're pulling back the curtain on the 2026 midterms exposing a picture that is darker and more dangerous than anything we've seen in decades. It's not just typical horse trading politics, not just mudslinging, not just the clash of ideas that elections are supposed to be about. Instead, what we're watching is one of America's two major political parties. The Republican party abandoning any pretense of competing honorably. They're not trying to win voters. They're not trying to build coalitions. They're certainly not trying to persuade anyone in the middle. What they are doing instead is rigging the system in every way possible, choking democracy into submission before voters even get to speak. Republican leaders are running scared. They see the ground shifting beneath them. The demographics of America are changing. More diverse, more urban, more progressive, more resistant to a backward looking agenda. Built on resentment and fear. They know young people are coming of age with entirely different values than their base. They see the polls where policies like universal healthcare, reproductive freedom, climate change action, and fair wages, enjoy majority support. And what terrifies them is that if elections are fair, if every citizen truly has an equal voice. They cannot win. So instead of adapting, instead of evolving, they've chosen sabotage, bending the machinery of democracy until it serves only them. Nowhere is this clearer than in the obscene mastery Republicans have developed over gerrymandering. Gerrymandering isn't new. It stretches back to the 19th century. But what has happened in recent years is categorically different. The old days of state legislators sketching maps of the rough political instincts are gone today. Republicans are armed with high powered data analytics voter files with personal detail done to your likely shopping habits and algorithms that can draw districts so precise, so bizarre that the outcome is essentially preordained. In Wisconsin, Democrats won 53% of the statewide assembly vote in 2018, a clear majority, yet Republicans still walked away with nearly two thirds of the seats. In Ohio, the so-called redistricting reform process was hijacked by Republicans on their state Supreme Court, allowing GOP politicians to impose maps so rigged that even after multiple rulings, they were unconstitutional. Republicans carried on using them many way in the 2022 elections. Think about that. Courts declaring the maps unlawful, yet elections being held under them anyway, cementing Republican dominance despite the Democratic verdict to the people. This is not democracy. It's bookkeeping fraud. On a mass scale election theft before the ballots are even cast, a party that cannot persuade is engineered. A system with a structure itself does the persuasion for them, but warping lines on a map is only one prong with a machinery. Republicans have also embarked on a relentless campaign to block voters from getting to the polls at all. And let's be clear, these are not abstract bureau bureaucratic rule changes. These are suppressive laws aimed like arrows at communities most likely to vote Democratic in Texas, the infamous Senate bill won passed in 2021, banned drive through voting, made it harder to vote by mail, and impose criminal penalties on election workers and empowered partisan poll watchers to harass those at the ballot box. Who did those drive-through? Voting options benefit during the pandemic. Largely black and Latino communities working long hours with limited ability to stand in endless lines. Texas Republicans didn't celebrate that civic participation. They killed it in Georgia. After record breaking black turnout in 2020 and 21, the Republican legislature responded with Senate Bill 2 0 2, which allows the state to cease control of local election boards. Restricts absentee voting and even makes it a crime to handle bottle of water to citizens waiting in endless lines at polling places. These long lines, of course, disproportionately exist in communities of color where polling locations have been closed. From 2012 to 2018, Georgia closed over 200 precincts overwhelmingly in minority areas, forcing those communities to wait hours longer to cast the same vote their suburban neighbors could cast in minutes. That's not security, that's targeted disenfranchisement, dressed in the robes of integrity. Florida provides another example of the cruelty and cynicism at work after Floridians by a wide bipartisan map margin. Passed Amendment four in 2018 to restore voting rights to former felons. Republicans in the state legislature gutted that promise by imposing fines, fees, and nearly impossible to navigate paperwork requirements. The result, hundreds of thousands who should have regained their franchise remained locked out, fearful that even attempting to vote might land them in jail. Ron DeSantis took this further still by creating an election police unit that his arrested citizens are trying to vote because they misunderstood the Byzantine new rules, a spectacle design not only to punish, but to intimidate. The message is clear, attempt to participate and the state might prosecute you. This is not democracy. It is intimidation, cloaked as law and the truth. The ugly, undeniable truth is that Republicans no longer even bother hiding their motives. Again and again, GOP strategists have been caught admitting these laws purpose are not about preventing non-existent fraud, but about suppressing democratic votes. A Pennsylvania Republican leader blurted it out in 2012 when he proclaiming the state's new voter ID law was gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state in Wisconsin. A judge noted the architects of voter ID there privately acknowledged students. IDs weren't acceptable because they knew students overwhelmingly lean democratic. They're saying the quiet, put it out loud now, but let's understand the deeper arc. These aren't just short term electoral maneuvers. They belong to the long American tradition of disenfranchisement that stretches from Jim Crow right into the present. We've seen these tactics before just dress differently during the Jim Crow era. Devices like literacy tests and poll taxes were deployed with surgical position to keep black citizens from voting while giving white voters loopholes. It took John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, and thousands of unnamed activists risking life and limb to tear down those barriers due the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And what Republicans are doing now is in spirit, no different. They're replacing poll taxes with expensive ID requirements. Replacing literary tests with needlessly complicated registration processes and replacing violence in southern courthouses with subtle or bureaucratic choke points. The faces and technologies change, but the intent remains identical. Keep the disfavored out, protect minority rule. The courts have played a devastating role here too. The Supreme Court decision in Shelby County V Holder in 2013 was a bomb dropped on the Voting Rights Act. Stripping away pre-clearance provisions that prevented southern states with long racist histories from enacting discriminatory voting laws. Chief Justice John Roberts claimed the era of discrimination was behind us, that the law had served its purpose. Within hours, hours of that ruling, Texas moved to implement the strictest voter ID law in the country. By weeks end states from Alabama to Mississippi were falling in line crafting barriers that never would've passed the OJ scrutiny under the old rules. And when those laws were challenged, their defenders admitted often in court that the goal was to craft legislation targeting black citizens and college students with almost surgical precision. Nothing in the mid 20th century could have said it more plainly than that. If the ghost of Jim Crow marched back onto the scene today, they'd marvel only at the sophistication of the digital era, where once bullies used Billy clubs to keep black citizens from voting. Now state legislators wield mass and voter ID statues with the same effect where once Southern registrars humiliated people with so-called literacy tests now algorithmic redistricting systems, shuffled communities into impossible shapes designed to erase their voice. The through line is unmistakable. It would be tempting to think these are just echoes of the distant past remnants of Jim Crow, but the Republican Party has made disenfranchisement a modern centerpiece again and again. Think back, for instance of Florida in the year 2000, the infamous presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore was decided by just 537 votes. Yet before that outcome, Florida undertook a voter purge ostensibly to remove felons from the rolls. In reality, the purge swept up thousands of lawful voters, overwhelmingly African American stripping them of their franchise based on inaccurate data. That single manipulation amplified by the Supreme Court's intervention and Bush Gore tilted the presidency itself. Disenfranchisement didn't just distort local representation, it picked the president of the United States. And then 2K. Two decades later, Donald Trump nearly broke the republic outright with his lies about the 2020 election stop. The steal was not a grassroots movement. It was a top-down propaganda campaign designed to accomplish two goals. First to Deeg, legitimize an opponent's victory, and second to justify a wave of new voter suppression laws. Republicans rushed into law afterward. Armed thug storm capitals. Death threats were hurled at election workers and armed insurrection is smeared built inside the halls of Congress at Trump's command, all in the name of denying voters voices. And while Trump's coup attempt failed to keep him in power, it succeeded in birthing a Republican party. Wholly committed to the big lie. Republican officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and elsewhere are today running under banners of election denial, promising not to respect results they don't like. This is no longer about competing for office. It is about holding power hostage to lies. So when we see Tom Cotton smearing Roy Cooper with false accusations that he personally caused a woman's tragic death, or when we see robocall targeting, BA targeting black voters, and misinformation about warrant related arrests of polling places. Or when we see FA fake ballot boxes in recruited third party candidates signed to confuse voters, we must recognize them not as isolated scandals, but as links in a chain. That chain runs uninterrupted from the Jim Crow South through Florida's purge of 2000 through Carl Rose voter Id crusades through Shelby County through Trump's war in the 2020 results, and now right into the 2026 electoral battlefield. The cumulative effect is staggering. Gerrymandering, Rob's votes. A professional way. Voter suppression prevents citizens from voting at all. Smears destroy faith in candidates and mis misinformation. Corrodes trust in the very process of elections. Layer these together and what you get is not a contest of ideas, but are Reed Circus, where one side is actively sabotaging democratic trust. We have reached a point where Republicans are not just competing cynically in politics. They're waging an outright war on democracy itself, and that's what makes this moment so perilous. This is not a partisan exaggeration. It is borne out in numbers in history and the architecture of law. When the Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, it took less than 24 hours for Texas to implement regressive ID laws. It had been waiting to unleash. North Carolina followed within weeks with the suppression law of federal court later described as targeting black voters with almost surgical position. These are not allegations. These are verdicts. This is the documented trajectory of the Republican project. Every time new voters gain ground, every time turnout diversifies, Republicans respond not with policy adjustments, but with attempts to silence it. The consequence of this trajectory is that the Republican Party cease to act. Like a Democratic competitor and has begun to behave like a ruling click, clinging to power at all costs. Parties that fear the electorate don't work harder to court it. They change the rules so the electorate cannot express itself, and this is why Republicans look less like a political party and 2026 and more like an authoritarian movement, terrified of accountability because when a major American party would rather collapse faith in elections than risk defeat at the polls. That's not just partisanship, that's the death rattle democracy. Every smear, every rig map, every voter purge reveals the same underlying panic. They know an honest competition would mean their loss. What Republicans are doing in Texas, Georgia, Wisconsin, Florida and beyond is the behavior of a party not merely trying to win. It is a behavior of a party running for its life. Running in short, scared. If we fail to recognize that, if we normalize it as just politics, then by the time 2026 concludes, we may find ourselves in a nation where citizens show up to vote, stand in line for hours, cast their ballots only to realize that the system has already decided the outcome. And once the people believe their participation does not matter, democracy is not simply injured, it is lost. That's the reality we're facing, heading into these midterms. The choice is no longer just between two parties. It is a choice between democracy and is dismantling between honest competition and cowardly sabotage. Republicans are not preparing to face the people they're preparing to silence'em. And if that doesn't terrify every voter in America, it should. This has been America's fractured politics. Get out and vote. Vote like your vote counts because it does. And remember, if we fight back, we'll win.